THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW 59 



Our dwellers in the open country number 1,700,000, and they 

 average only thirty-nine to the square mile. 



The ills attendant upon sparsity of population in rural regions 

 are social isolation and insulation, raucous individualism, illit- 

 eracy, suspicion, social aloofness, lack of organization and co- 

 operative enterprise; but our mountain people suffer from these 

 deficiencies not a whit more than the people in definite areas of 

 the tide-water country and in the State at large. 



Everywhere in thinly settled country regions we find people 

 here and there who are suspicious, secretive, apathetic, and un- 

 approachable ; who live in the eighteenth century and preserve 

 the language, manners, and customs of a past long dead else- 

 where, who prefer their primitive, ancient ways, who are ghet- 

 toed in the midst of present-day civilization, to borrow a phrase 

 from President Frost. They are the crab-like souls described 

 by Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables," who before advancing 

 light steadily retreat into the fringe of darkness. People like 

 these abound in Clinton and Franklin counties (New York) 

 where an eighth of the native white voters are illiterate, in 

 Aroostook County (Maine) where nearly a fifth of the native 

 white voters cannot read their ballots or write their names; in 

 AVindham County (Connecticut), where an eighth of the white 

 males of voting age are illiterate. Windham, by the way, lies 

 midway between the academic effulgence of Yale on the one 

 hand and of Harvard on the other. You can find within the 

 sound of college bells anywhere what we found the other day 

 in a field survey that took us into every home in a mid-state 

 county in North Carolina a family of whites all illiterate, half 

 the children dead in infancy, and never a doctor in the house in 

 the whole history of the family. 



All the ages of race history and every level of civilization can 

 be found in any county or community, even in our crowded 

 centers of wealth and culture. We need not hunt for eighteenth 

 century survivals in mountain coves alone. 



We shall not make headway in well-meant work in the moun- 

 tains unless we can bring to it what Giddings calls a conscious- 

 ness of kind. We need to be less aware of picturesque, amusing, 

 or distressing differences, and more keenly conscious of the kin- 

 ship of the mountain people with their kind elsewhere and 



